Comment / Seeing the value

My theme for this year is ‘Leading by numbers’. I have highlighted before opportunities for finance professionals to take a leading role as part of the transformation agenda. But a core foundation to this is finance leaders ensuring their teams are up to date and that they have the right skills to support the service as it meets its current challenges. 

Often, in times of financial austerity, one of the first budgets to be cut is training, development and coaching. It is seen as an easy target with no obvious, immediate cut in quality or quantity of services.

However, this is an extremely short-sighted approach. It stores up problems downstream creating skill gaps, but it actually undermines the ability to meet the very financial challenge the cutbacks aim to address. Tough financial environments require innovative responses and the provision of ongoing development can inspire this innovation.

All local health economies are working hard to identify solutions to the same sorts of challenges. Training and development – through networking, traditional conferences and online sharing and learning – are key ways to shortcircuit discovery of local solutions. We should also be looking across different sectors and at what the latest academic research tells us on how we can become more effective and efficient.

At a national level, there are clear signs that the importance of finance staff development is recognised. The Future-focused finance programme set up by the NHS Finance Leadership Council, in which the HFMA is rightly a key player, demonstrates this. Its vision recognises the need for NHS finance to evolve so it can maximise the value it adds to the health service and the value of services to patients.

A large part of this vision is the development of individuals and teams. And it has certainly rung a chord with the function itself. The number of finance directors who have signed declarations of support is clear demonstration of their backing for FFF and their specific commitment to develop their teams – and it shows their determination to ‘lead by numbers’.

We need our finance teams to be more active than ever in looking for new ways of working and how they can best serve clinical teams to drive the transformation programme. FFF has released an enthusiasm among finance staff to meet this challenge head on and we need to make the most of it.

Aside from its core involvement with the Finance Leadership Council and FFF programme, the HFMA continues to look for opportunities to support the development of finance staff. For example, again supporting my theme of ‘Leading by numbers’, the HFMA has developed a coaching service. I have found access to coaching has been invaluable at key points in my career. This is a fantastic way to help individuals get tailored support to maximise their own contribution to their organisations’ and their wider health economies’ performance.

Initial responses to the HFMA coaching service are very encouraging and, while in its first stages it has been offered primarily to finance directors, it will soon be rolled out to other finance team members too. I urge each of you to consider how you and your teams can benefit from coaching. 

Both these examples – the FFF work and the new HFMA coaching service – are evidence that the finance function recognises the role of development in meeting the current financial challenge. So in terms of a response to the current pressures, there appears to be no short-sightedness among the finance community. Together we need to make sure it remains this way.